In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [235]
Looking back, I find it difficult to describe how densely her life was covered in a network of alternating, fugitive, often contradictory desires. No doubt falsehood complicated this still further, for, as she retained no accurate memory of our conversations, if, for example, she had said to me: “Ah! that was a pretty girl, if you like, and a good golfer,” and, when I had asked the girl’s name, had answered with that detached, universal, superior air of which no doubt there is always enough and to spare, for all liars of this category borrow it for a moment when they do not wish to answer a question, and it never fails them: “Ah, I’m afraid I don’t know” (with regret at her inability to enlighten me), “I never knew her name, I used to see her on the golf course, but I didn’t know what she was called”—if, a month later, I said to her: “Albertine, you remember that pretty girl you mentioned to me, who used to play golf so well,” “Ah, yes,” she would answer without thinking, “Emilie Daltier, I don’t know what’s become of her.” And the lie, like a line of earthworks, was carried back from the defence of the name, now captured, to the possibilities of meeting her again. “Oh, I couldn’t say, I never knew her address. I can’t think of anyone who could give it to you. Oh, no! Andrée never knew her. She wasn’t one of our little band, now so scattered.”
At other times the lie took the form of a base admission: “Ah! if I had three hundred thousand francs a year …” She bit her lip. “Well? what would you do then?” “I should ask your permission,” she said, kissing me, “to stay with you always. Where else could I be so happy?”
But, even allowing for her lies, it was incredible how spasmodic her life was, how fugitive her strongest desires. She would be mad about a person whom, three days later, she would refuse to see. She could not wait for an hour while I sent out for canvas and colours, for she wished to start painting again. For two whole days she would be impatient, almost shed the tears, quickly dried, of an infant that has just been weaned from its nurse. And this instability of her feelings with regard to people, things, occupations, arts, places, was in fact so universal that, if she did love money, which I do not believe, she cannot have loved it for longer than anything else. When she said: “Ah! if I had three hundred thousand francs a year!” or even if she expressed a nefarious but short-lived thought, she could not have held on to it any longer than to the idea of going to Les Rochers, of which she had seen an engraving in my grandmother’s edition of Mme de Sévigné, of meeting an old friend from the golf course, of going up in an aeroplane, of going to spend Christmas with her aunt, or of taking up painting again.
“By the way, since neither of us is really hungry, we might look in at the Verdurins’,” Albertine said to me. “This is their day and their hour.”
“But I thought you were cross with them?”
“Oh! there are all sorts of stories about them, but really they’re not so bad as all that. Madame Verdurin has always been very nice to me. Besides, one can’t keep on quarrelling all the time with everybody. They have their faults, but who hasn’t?”
“You’re not properly dressed, you would have to go home and dress, and that would make us very late.”
“Yes, you’re